On WebSpeaks.in today there's a recent post that introduces you to something more and more applications are using - especially frameworks - method chaining in PHP OOP apps.

In this article we will learn an advanced OOPS programming concept in PHP known as Method chaining. If you have worked on PHP frameworks like Zend, Magento or CakePHP, you might have noticed a very convinient style of accessing methods of different classes. [...] This type of programming technique is known as method chaining. If you are thinking how is it possible to perform this chaining, then don't worry. Today we will learn this fancy concept.

They create a simple class, a Person, and show the difference between calling several methods on the created object versus a method chained example that calls all three, making updates to the object itself ($this). There's also a bit more complicated example with three different classes in the mix.

Ben Vinegar, having come from Rails to PHP was missing something - the ActiveSupport functionality Rails had natively that PHP doesn't. So, he's written up his own support for it and shares it in his latest blog post.

One of the things I miss most from Rails is ActiveSupport, the module that modifies Ruby's core classes (numbers, strings, more) with handy utility methods. They tie so well into the language, most Rails developers don't realize they aren't core methods.

He starts with a Ruby example, showing how they work to show things like camelized strings, times and evaluations. Since PHP doesn't support the same syntax, he had to work around it with some "PHP trickery" in PHP5 to handle it similarly. You can check out the results in the examples in his blog or by downloading the library and trying it out for yourself.